This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1848. Excerpt: ... spirit. Even the external and material civilisation of this age was the most startling display of incongruities and incompletenesses, --the most curious patchwork of cloth of gold and frieze. And that was but a type or emblem of its mental and moral civilisation, which in like manner everywhere betrays its volcanic origin by such intermixtures and combinations as seem to us in the present day all but incredible, unintelligible, and impossible. 4. But now our story must return once more to him who plays the most conspicuous part in it in the line of religious profession. Leicester had soon re-emerged from the eclipse brought upon him by the detection of his marriage in the end of 1579. After a few months we find him again as high in the royal regard and confidence as ever. Nor did he lose his old popular reputation. When his great rival and enemy Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, died in the beginning of June 1583, the favourite had the credit of having sent him to the other world by the same means which he was believed to have employed with Essex, and Chatillon, and Throckmorton. It was said that Sussex himself had on his death-bed declared his conviction that poison had been given him by Leicester's contrivance. Naunton reports him to have cautioned his friends, when taking his last farewell of them, to "beware of the Gypsey" (meaning Leicester); "for," he added, "he will be too hard for you all; you know not the beast so well as I do." Camden also expressly states that, when in September 1586, after the discovery of Babington's conspiracy, the ministers were deliberating, in considerable perplexity, what course should be taken with the Queen of Scots, Leicester, who was then in the Netherlands, wrote over advising that she should be quietly taken o...